In recent years, depending upon the printer in question, it has in some cases become possible to carry out what is called four-sided borderless printing—in which printing is carried out over the entirety of the printed surface of the printing paper—of images based on data subject to printing. Furthermore, standalone printers capable of causing prescribed data to be printed on printing paper in standalone fashion without the need to connect to host apparatuses—representative among which are personal computers and the like—have come into widespread use. Also appearing on the scene are hybrid printers in which scanner capabilities have been further added to such standalone printers such that images captured by means of scanner mechanisms can be printed onto printing paper in direct fashion by means of printer mechanisms without intervention by host apparatuses.
With a hybrid printer, because connection to a host apparatus is not required, a user might typically place an original on an original stage and operate a control panel provided on a main body so as to give print instructions to the standalone printer, and this might then cause same to be scanned by the scanner mechanism, following which printing thereof by the printer mechanism might be automatically carried out, as a result of which print results could be obtained.
It has been the case with such hybrid printers, when printing is carried out as a result of instruction to cause printer mechanism to directly perform four-sided borderless printing of image captured from original by scanner mechanism onto printing paper identical in size to original, that, because scan region capable of being captured by scan mechanism is smaller than entire original surface region by amount corresponding to prescribed margins (hereinafter “scanner margins”), such scanner margins appear in unabated fashion on printing paper, making it impossible to obtain satisfactory print results. Improvement of mechanical precision in connection with both scanning and printing in order to adjust such discrepancy between scan regions of scanner mechanism and print region of printer mechanism has been a problem from the standpoint of product cost. Particularly with the aforementioned standalone-printer sort of hybrid printer, because individual users represent the primary target of sales activities, there is a strong desire to keep product costs to a minimum.